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Project Awakened: A Conversation With Phosphor Games On Kickstarter And Customizing Everything

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As Project Awakened nears the Kickstarter finish line, things aren't looking great for the customize-everything action game, but Phosphor Games remains optimistic.

Project Awakened is an ambitious game.

Like many of its counter-parts on Kickstarter, it appeals to the indie gamer as much as to the indie game developer.

Here is a game that eschews much of what defines the modern shooter genre, that promises an infinite number of customization options, that gives players the capacity to create not just elaborately defined action heroes, but entire worlds and games using the same tools that the developers themselves use in their Unreal Engine 4 action title.

Of course, the customization and super-power action aren't the only things that make the game sound cool. Journey composer Austin Wintory has signed on as the game's composer. They even have a tech demo of the Unreal Engine 4 at work:

The modding tools are probably the most interesting thing about the game to me.

"Using a very intuitive level editor, " a Kickstarter update reads, "you can place pre-existing objects from your library in the scene and setup a unique level with custom rules. It is trivial to create a character template, assign them weapons, health/speed values, abilities, etc, and then set them up to spawn as enemies in the level. Replace your player character with one of your design, and you've created a brand new experience. Share this map with the world, and see what they think!"

In the below video they go through several possible mods: science fiction themed, military themed and, my personal favorite, a totally overhauled fantasy theme with no guns in sight. For that reason alone---because I'd like to just play with the level editor and build my own game-within-a-game---I hope Project Awakened succeeds.

Check it out:

This all sounds great, but apparently the crowd-funding scene doesn't agree. With just four days to go, the project has only raised (and I say "only" here rather loosely) $200,000 and change---well short of the half million dollar goal Project Awakened is shooting for.

I had the chance to ask Chip Sineni, Phosphor Games Studio Director, a few questions about the game and where they stand in these last few days of Kick-starting.

Forbes: Project Awakened sounds really neat, but I worry that when developers promise things that sound too good to be true, they probably won't deliver. How far along in development are you in this game, and will half a million dollars really be enough to finish?

Sineni: We've already been working on Project Awakened for a while, so we aren't starting from scratch. All of the footage you see in the video and the screenshots we've posted show a ton of content that we have ready-made, so we're pretty far along already. Also, we are planning on putting additional funding into this project on top of the funds we get from Kickstarter. So, the base Kickstarter goal isn't "what you'd need to make Project Awakened from scratch", it's the minimum that we need which, when added to our own funding, would allow us to put a dedicated team into finishing what we have already.

We are also starting with a big advantage given our expertise and usage of UE4. Many other high profile Kickstarters have high funding goals because they are rolling their own engine, which we can avoid due to our great relationship with Epic Games.

One last important point - the development of Project Awakened does not end with the launch of our game. Depending on the level of success of our Kickstarter program, we may not be able to hit every single one of our goals at launch, but we will continue to work on it afterwards to grow into the vision we have of the game. We are definitely taking a big page out of the playbook of other digitally distributed games like Minecraft and Dota2. We want this game to eventually be everything we've envisioned, even if it takes a little longer than expected. Hopefully we can do this while providing a fun, evolving, replayable game that our community wants to play and grow with for a long, long time.

Freedom in a game can be fun, but it can also detract from the actual game itself. How do you balance an open-ended gaming experience with compelling gameplay?

When we started on the first version of this game, it was completely open world, and it was fun to goof around and test out your powers and cause some trouble. But through development, we found out the hard way that it was very difficult to give a focus and balance to the game when we were trying to do intricate missions - it was too easy for the player to break stuff and leave the mission hanging, or we had to make the missions so simple you could complete them with any skills. Our second attempt was to make the game very focused and linear. This worked better for missions, but really didn’t have enough "breathing room" to try out abilities, etc. Plus, the cost of the content was very expensive to create per minute of gameplay and, even though it had replay value if you picked different skills, if you had the same character, there wasn't much it offered .

So, what we have come up with through years of prototyping both ways, is what we feel is the best of both worlds for our game. We have a sandbox style world where you can receive missions and have more broad gameplay, but then have these spokes off the hubs where the detailed, more intricate missions happen. This way, there is still significant game time but we still get these well-crafted levels that allow players to really exploit their abilities.

What games serve as inspiration for the project? What made you decide that you wanted to play this type of game in particular, and why is character customization so compelling?

A lot of the original inspiration came from us being amazed by the Create-A-Player systems in MMOs, and wondering why that couldn’t be applied to action games. Specifically, I remember a meeting where the lead Blitz team designers (Midway Games) were demoing how cool the Create-A-Player in City of Heroes was, but then playing the game it still was very much a classic MMO set-up, like enemies were just all around and you just clicked around and dispatched them. It was great for MMO fans, but for videogame action fans, it just didn’t have any depth. You couldn't create a real Sam Fisher or Solid Snake and sneak around the shadows, or play as Space Marine like Master Chief or Marcus Fenix and get into these well-constructed firefights, or make a Ninja Gaiden style katana master and have these amazingly powerful move sets.

It really occurred to us that nobody ever put this awesome customization to an action game before.

The modding potential is one of the neatest looking aspects of the game. Will players be able to create entire game worlds with this software? Are there any licensing issues that might hamper mod accessibility?

Players can change everything with modding. It is funny that Gabe Newell at DICE said he was seeing games as "productivity platforms" to make stuff, and Project Awakened is very similar to that. The character you play with is an act of creation that some people might tinker with endlessly and tear down what they had and start over just to see it all unfold differently . Multiplayer is an act of creation- depending on what kinds of characters and what kinds of tuning you set, it becomes a whole different game. For example, you might make one overpowered alien or zombie or vampire, and put it against 7 soldiers. You have a switch to inherit the abilities and gear of the enemy faction on death. So, once a person dies, they become that other character you created. All of a sudden, you have this new game you created.

Modding takes this way further. If players tweak weapons or change the world, it really can become anything. Project Awakened essentially becomes a game making kit. They can create sci-fi, fantasy, zombie, historical, whatever kind of action game they want with it.

In terms of licensing, that is a murky issue. I know a lot of big name games have mods that use other intellectual property. I think we'll just have to see what the extent of it is and what that specific IP holder's feelings are on it. It seems like every company has different philosophies on it. Some brands see mods as a way of keeping their IP alive and relevant, some see it as competition.

What revenue model will you be using for this game?

We have thought of a lot of different ways we could monetize the game, but right now with the Kickstarter program, we are planning something similar to what Minecraft does, with a lower price for the complete game. From there it is up to the community to decide what works for them. Perhaps some of the mod creators will put so much time in a creation they will want to get paid for their work, similar to mods in Team Fortress and DOTA, and we put up a store to facilitate that. It is too early to tell where this can go and we want to see where the fans take it before we prematurely guess what they want to do.

Why choose Kickstarter instead of going with more traditional outside funding entirely? Did you attempt to pitch the game to publishers?

We have pitched the game to every major publisher at some point, and with how quickly the market changes, there have been different reasons for them not to do this. Essentially, the groups we talked to all liked the idea a lot, and it would get pushed through their green light processes, but ultimately it would be declined because they felt it was too different from what gamers were purchasing. Before Minecraft, there wasn't much market data that showed players actually wanted to create things in their games.

In the current market now, most publishers really only invest in bigger internal developments or sequels with external developers. It makes sense; it is easier to oversee big ideas with internal teams. Project Awakened is too big to be a lower risk mobile style title, but isn’t a known slam dunk like the existing top ten IPs.

With just a few days left on your Kickstarter drive, what happens if this falls through? Is it back to the drawing board or will you seek other funding sources?

We knew that Project Awakened was such an innovative, outside-of-the-box kind of idea and that it would be a challenging funding route to take. If we don't make the 500k, we have to keep making the game very slowly in our spare time, if nothing else comes up for funding elsewhere (we will keep looking). We would not be able to promise a 2014 beta, and it would likely take a long time to complete.

With four days left on Kickstarter, we are remaining optimistic that the community can pull this one out in dramatic fashion. We are inspired by all the tremendous support we’ve received from backers as well as the media so far. We urge everyone who believes in this game to support our Kickstarter campaign before it’s too late, and urge them to tell their friends and social networks to do the same. We are making this game because it is the game we’ve always dreamed of making as developers and playing as gamers.

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Head over to the Kickstarter page to learn more or to pledge. It's a steep hill to victory, but we've seen some pretty crazy 11th hour successes in the past year or so.

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